Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher who
remains famous and influential even today for his critiques of religion,
morality, contemporary culture, and science. His works include The
Birth of Tragedy (1871), The Gay Science (1882), and Beyond
Good and Evil (1886).

We must now summon to our aid all the principles of art
discussed so far in order to find our way through what we are bound to
describe as the labyrinth of theorigin of
Greek tragedy. I believe I am not talking nonsense when I assert that
this problem of origin has not yet even been posed seriously, far less
solved, despite the many attempts to sew together and pull apart again the
tattered shreds of ancient historical evidence in various combinations. This
evidence tells us most decisively that tragedy arose from the tragic
chorus and was originally chorus and nothing but chorus. From this
we derive the obligation to look into the heart of this tragic chorus as into
the true, original drama, rather than simply contenting ourselves with the
usual artistic clichés, such as the claim that the chorus is the ideal (idealisch) spectator, or that it represents the
people in contrast to the princely region of the stage. This last
interpretation sounds so lofty to the ears of some politicians, as if the
immutable moral law of the democratic Athenians were represented in the
popular chorus which was always proved right, beyond all the passionate
excesses and indulgences of the kings. But no matter how strongly a remark by
Aristotle seems to suggest this,59 this idea had no influence
on the original formation of tragedy, since its
purely religious origins preclude the entire opposition between prince and
people, and indeed any kind of political-social sphere. Even with regard to
the classical form of the chorus familiar to us from the works of Aeschylus
and Sophocles, we regard it as blasphemous to speak of the premonition of a
'constitutional popular assembly', although others have been less reluctant
to commit this blasphemy. In practice the ancient constitutions know of no
constitutional popular assembly, and it is to be hoped that they did not even
have a 'premonition' of one in their tragedy.

Much more famous than this political explanation of the chorus
is one of A. W. Schlegel's60 thoughts which recommends us to
think of the chorus as, in a certain sense, the quintessence and distillation
of the crowd of spectators, as the 'ideal spectator'. When set next to the
historical evidence that tragedy was originally only a chorus, this suggestion
is revealed for what it really is: a crude, unscientific, but brilliant
assertion, but one which derives its brilliance from the concentrated manner
of its expression alone, from the characteristic Germanic prejudice in favour of anything that is called 'ideal', and from our
momentary astonishment. For when we compare the public in the theatre, which
we know well, with that chorus, we are simply astonished and we ask ourselves
if it would ever be possible to distil from this public something ideal that
would be analogous to the tragic chorus. In the privacy of our own thoughts
we deny this possibility and we are as much surprised by the boldness of
Schlegel's assertion as we are by the utterly different nature of the Greek
public. This is because we had always believed that a proper spectator,
whoever he might be, always had to remain conscious of the fact that what he
saw before him was a work of art and not empirical reality, whereas the
tragic chorus of the Greeks is required to see in the figures on stage real,
physically present, living beings. The chorus of the Oceanides61 really
believes that it sees before it the Titan Prometheus, and takes itself to be
as real as the god on the stage. Are we then supposed to believe that the
highest and purest kind of spectator is one who, like the Oceanides,
believes Prometheus to be physically present and real? And that it would be
the mark of the ideal spectator to run on to the stage and free the god from
his tortures? We had believed in an aesthetic public and had gauged the
individual spectator's competence by the degree of his ability to take the
work of art as art, i.e. aesthetically; but now Schlegel's phrase gave us to
understand that the perfect, ideal spectator lets himself be affected by the
world on stage physically and empirically rather than aesthetically. Oh,
curse these Greeks, we sigh; they turn our aesthetics upside down! As we are
accustomed to this, however, we simply repeated Schlegel's dictum whenever
the chorus was under discussion.

But the historical evidence explicitly speaks against Schlegel
here: the chorus as such, without a stage, which is to say the primitive form
of tragedy, is not compatible with that chorus of ideal spectators. What kind
of artistic genre would be one derived from the concept of the spectator, one
where the true form of the genre would have to be regarded as the 'spectator
as such'? The spectator without a spectacle is a nonsense.
We fear that the explanation for the birth of tragedy can be derived neither
from respect for the moral intelligence of the masses, nor from the concept
of the spectator without a play, and we regard the problem as too profound
for it even to be touched by such shallow ways of thinking about it.

In his famous preface to the Bride of Messina62 Schiller
betrayed an infinitely more valuable insight into the significance of the
chorus when he considered it to be a living wall which tragedy draws about itself in order to shut itself off in purity from the real
world and to preserve its ideal ground and its poetic freedom.

This is Schiller's main weapon in his fight against the common
concept of the natural, against the illusion commonly demanded of dramatic
poetry. He argued that, although in the theatre the day itself was only
artificial, the architecture symbolic, and metrical speech had an ideal
character, on the whole error still prevailed; it was not enough merely to
tolerate as poetic freedom something which was, after all, the essence of all
poetry. The introduction of the chorus was the decisive step by which war was
declared openly and honestly on all naturalism in art. It seems to me that
this way of looking at things is precisely what our (in its own opinion)
superior age dismisses with the slogan 'pseudo-idealism'. I fear that, with
our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the
opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.
They too contain a kind of art, as do certain of today's popular novels; but
let nobody torment us with the claim that, thanks to this art, the
'pseudo-idealism' of Schiller and Goethe has been overcome.

It is admittedly an 'ideal' ground on which, as Schiller rightly
saw, the Greek chorus of satyrs, the chorus of the original tragedy, is wont
to walk, a ground raised high above the real path along which mortals wander.
For this chorus the Greeks built the hovering platform of a fictitious state
of nature on to which they placed fictitious creatures of
nature. Tragedy grew up on this foundation, and for this very reason, of
course, was relieved from the very outset of any need to copy reality with
painful exactness. Yet it is not a world which mere caprice and fantasy have
conjured up between heaven and earth; rather it is a world which was just as
real and credible to the believing Greek as Olympus and its inhabitants. As a
member of the Dionysiac chorus, the satyr lives in
a religiously acknowledged reality sanctioned by myth and cult. The fact that
tragedy begins with the satyr, and that the Dionysiac
wisdom of tragedy speaks out of him, is something which now surprises us just
as much as the fact that tragedy originated in the chorus. Perhaps it will
serve as a starting-point for thinking about this if I now assert that the
satyr, the fictitious creature of nature, bears the same relation to the
cultured human being as Dionysiac music bears to
civilization. Of the latter Richard Wagner has said that it is absorbed,
elevated, and extinguished (aufgehoben) by
music, just as lamplight is superseded by the light of day.63 I
believe that, when faced with the chorus of satyrs, cultured Greeks felt
themselves absorbed, elevated, and extinguished in exactly the same way. This
is the first effect of Dionysiac tragedy: state and
society, indeed all divisions between one human being and another, give way
to an overwhelming feeling of unity which leads men back to the heart of
nature. The metaphysical solace which, I wish to suggest, we derive from
every true tragedy, the solace that in the ground of things, and despite all
changing appearances, life is indestructibly mighty and pleasurable, this
solace appears with palpable clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of
natural beings whose life goes on ineradicably behind and beyond all
civilization, as it were, and who remain eternally the same despite all the
changes of generations and in the history of nations.

The Hellene, by nature profound and uniquely capable of the most
exquisite and most severe suffering, comforts himself with this chorus, for
he has gazed with keen eye into the midst of the fearful, destructive havoc
of so-called world history, and has seen the cruelty of nature, and is in
danger of longing to deny the will as the Buddhist does. Art saves him, and
through art life saves him—for itself.

The reason for this is that the ecstasy of the Dionysiac state, in which the usual barriers and limits
of existence are destroyed, contains, for as long as it lasts, alethargic element in which all personal
experiences from the past are submerged. This gulf of oblivion separates the
worlds of everyday life and Dionysiac experience.
But as soon as daily reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as
such with a sense of revulsion; the fruit of those states is an ascetic,
will-negating mood. In this sense Dionysiac man is
similar to Hamlet: both have gazed into
the true essence of things, they have acquired knowledge and
they find action repulsive, for their actions can do nothing to change the
eternal essence of things; they regard it as laughable or shameful that they
should be expected to set to rights a world so out of joint. Knowledge kills
action; action requires one to be shrouded in a veil of illusion—this is the
lesson of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom
about Jack the Dreamer who does not get around to acting because he reflects
too much, out of an excess of possibilities, as it were. No, it is not reflection, it is true knowledge, insight into the
terrible truth, which outweighs every motive for action, both in the case of Hamlet and in that of Dionysiac
man. Now no solace has any effect, there is a longing for a world beyond
death, beyond the gods themselves; existence is denied, along with its
treacherous reflection in the gods or in some immortal Beyond. Once truth has
been seen, the consciousness of it prompts man to see only what is terrible
or absurd in existence wherever he looks; now he understands the symbolism of
Ophelia's fate, now he grasps the wisdom of the wood-god Silenus:
he feels revulsion.

Here, at this moment of supreme danger for the will, art approaches
as a saving sorceress with the power to heal. Art alone can re-direct those
repulsive thoughts about the terrible or absurd nature of existence into representations
with which man can live; these representations are the sublime,
whereby the terrible is tamed by artistic means, and the comical,
whereby disgust at absurdity is discharged by artistic means. The dithyramb's
chorus of satyrs is the saving act of Greek art; the attacks of revulsion
described above spent themselves in contemplation of the intermediate world
of these Dionysiac companions.

17

Dionysiac art,
too, wants to convince us of the eternal lust and delight of existence; but
we are to seek this delight, not in appearances but behind them. We are to
recognize that everything which comes into being must be prepared for painful
destruction; we are forced to gaze into the terrors of individual
existence—and yet we are not to freeze in horror: its metaphysical solace
tears us momentarily out of the turmoil of changing figures. For brief
moments we are truly the primordial being itself and we feel its unbounded
greed and lust for being; the struggle, the agony, the destruction of
appearances, all this now seems to us to be necessary, given the uncountable
excess of forms of existence thrusting and pushing themselves into life,
given the exuberant fertility of the world-Will; we are pierced by the
furious sting of these pains at the very moment when, as it were, we become
one with the immeasurable, primordial delight in existence and receive an
intimation, in Dionysiac ecstasy, that this delight
is indestructible and eternal. Despite fear and pity, we are happily alive,
not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose
procreative lust we have become one.

The genesis of Greek tragedy now tells us with great clarity and
definiteness how the tragic work of art of the Greeks was truly born from the
spirit of music; we believe that, with this thought, we have done justice for
the first time to the original and quite astonishing significance of the
chorus. At the same time, we have to admit that the meaning of the tragic
myth, as we have stated it, never became transparent and conceptually clear to
the Greek poets, far less to the Greek philosophers; to a certain extent,
their heroes speak more superficially than they act; myth is certainly not
objectified adequately in the spoken word. The structure of the scenes and
the vivid images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can put into
words and concepts; the same thing can be seen in Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for example, similarly speaks more
superficially than he acts, so that the aforementioned lesson of Hamlet cannot be drawn
from the words of the play, but from intense contemplation of, and reflection
on, the whole. In the case of Greek tragedy, which we admittedly only find in
the form of a word-drama, I have even indicated that the incongruity of myth
and word could easily mislead us into thinking that it is shallower and more
insignificant than it really is, and therefore into supposing that it had a
more superficial effect than it must have had in reality, according to the
testimony of the ancients, for it is so easy to forget that what the
word-poet failed to achieve, namely the highest spiritualization and
idealization of myth, he could accomplish successfully at any moment as a
creative musician. Admittedly, we have to reconstruct the overpowering effect
of the music almost by scholarly means, in order to receive something of that
incomparable solace which must be inherent in true tragedy. But only if we
were Greeks would we have felt the overpowering effect of music to be
precisely this; whereas, when we listen to fully evolved Greek music and
compare it to the much richer music with which we are now familiar, we
believe that we are hearing only the youthful song of musical genius, struck
up with a shy feeling of strength. As the Egyptian priests said, the Greeks
are eternal children,130 and in the tragic art, too, they are
mere children who do not know what sublime toy has been created—and
smashed—by their hands.

That struggle of the spirit of music to be revealed in image and
myth, a struggle which grows in intensity from the beginnings of the lyric up
to Attic tragedy, suddenly breaks off, having just unfolded its riches, and
disappears, as it were, from the face of Hellenic art, whereas the Dionysiac view of the world which was born out of this
struggle lives on in the Mysteries and, while undergoing the strangest
metamorphoses and degenerate mutations, never ceases to attract more serious
natures. Will it perhaps, at some time in the future, re-emerge from its
mystical depths as art?

What concerns us here is the question of whether the opposing
power on which tragedy foundered will for ever
remain strong enough to prevent the re-awakening of tragedy and the tragic
view of the world. If ancient tragedy was thrown off course by the
dialectical drive towards knowledge and the optimism of science, one should
conclude from this fact that there is an eternal struggle between the theoretical and
the tragic views of the world. Only when the spirit of science
has been carried to its limits and its claim to universal validity negated by
the demonstration of these limits might one hope for a rebirth of tragedy;
the symbol which we would propose for this cultural form is that of the music-making
Socrates in the sense discussed above. In making this contrast, what
I understand by the spirit of science is the belief, which first came to
light in the person of Socrates, that the depths of
nature can be fathomed and that knowledge can heal all ills.

Anyone who recalls the immediate effects produced by this
restlessly advancing spirit of science will recognize at once how myth was
destroyed by it, and how this destruction drove poetry from its natural,
ideal soil, so that it became homeless from that point onwards. If we are
correct in ascribing to music the power to give birth to myth once more, we
must also expect to see the spirit of science advancing on a hostile course
towards the myth-creating force of music. This occurs during the evolution of
the new Attic dithyramb, where the music no longer expressed the
inner essence, the Will itself, but simply reproduced appearances
inadequately, in an imitation mediated by concepts; truly musical natures
then turned away from this inwardly degenerate music with the same feeling of
revulsion as they felt for Socrates' tendency to murder art. Aristophanes'
sure instinct certainly grasped things correctly when he expressed the same
hatred for Socrates himself, the tragedy of Euripides, and the music of the
new exponents of the dithyramb, for he scented the characteristics of a
degenerate culture in all three phenomena. Thanks to the new dithyramb, a
sacrilege was committed which turned music into a mere counterfeit of some
phenomenon, e.g. of a battle or a storm at sea, and thus robbed it entirely
of its myth-making power. For if music seeks to excite our pleasure merely by
compelling us to seek out external analogies between events in life or nature
and certain rhythmical figures or characteristic musical sounds, if our understanding
is to be satisfied by recognizing these analogies, then we are dragged down
into a mood in which it is impossible to be receptive to the mythical; for
myth needs to be felt keenly as a unique example of something universal and
true which gazes out into infinity. In true Dionysiac
music we find just such a general mirror of the world-Will; a vivid event
refracted in this mirror expands immediately, we feel, into a copy of an
eternal truth. Conversely, a vivid event of this kind is immediately stripped
of any mythical character by the tone-painting of the new dithyramb; now
music has become a miserable copy of a phenomenon, and is thus infinitely
poorer than the phenomenon; as far as our feelings are concerned, this
poverty even reduces the phenomenon itself, so that, for example, a battle
imitated by such music amounts to no more than the noise of marching, the
sounds of signals etc., and our fantasy is arrested precisely by these
superficial details. Tone-painting is thus the antithesis of the myth-creating
energy of true music, for it makes the phenomenal world even poorer than it
is, whereas Dionysiac music enriches and expands
the individual phenomenon, making it into an image of the world. It was a
great victory for the un-Dionysiac spirit when,
during the evolution of the new dithyramb, it alienated music from itself and
reduced it to the status of a slave of appearances. Euripides, who must be
described as a thoroughly un-musical nature in a higher sense, is
passionately attached to the new dithyrambic music for precisely this reason,
and he makes free with all its showy effects and manners with all the
liberality of a robber.

Elsewhere we can see the force of this un-Dionysiac
spirit directed actively against myth if we look at the excessive growth in
the presentation of characterand of psychological refinement
in tragedy from Sophocles onwards. Character is no longer meant to be capable
of being expanded into an eternal type; on the contrary, artificial
subsidiary features, shading and the fine definition of every line, are all
meant to give such an impression of individuality that the spectator no
longer senses the myth at all, but only the great fidelity to nature and the
imitative skills of the artist. Here too we may observe the victory of the
phenomenal over the universal, and pleasure being taken in the individual
anatomical specimen, as it were; already we are breathing the air of a
theoretical world where scientific understanding is more highly prized than
the artistic reflection of a universal rule. The trend towards the
characteristic advances rapidly; whereas Sophocles still paints whole
characters, harnessing myth to expound them subtly, Euripides is already at
the stage of painting only individual characteristics which can be expressed
in powerful passions; in the New Attic Comedy there are only masks with a single expression:
frivolous old people, cheated pimps, cunning slaves, all tirelessly repeated.
Where has the myth-shaping spirit of music gone now? All that remains of
music is either music to excite the emotions or to prompt memory, i.e. either
a stimulant for blunt and jaded nerves or tone-painting. The former hardly
cares about the text to which it is set; even in Euripides verbal expression
is already beginning to become quite slovenly when the heroes or choruses
start to sing; how far are things likely to have gone amongst his shameless
successors?

But the clearest sign of the new, un-Dionysiac
spirit can be seen in the endingsof the
new dramas. In the old tragedy the audience experienced metaphysical solace,
without which it is quite impossible to explain man's pleasure in tragedy;
the sounds of reconciliation from another world can perhaps be heard at their
purest in Oedipus at Colonus. Now that
the spirit of music had flown from tragedy, it is, in the strictest sense,
dead, for from what other source was that metaphysical solace to come? Thus
people looked for an earthly resolution of the tragic dissonance: after he
had been sufficiently tortured by fate, the hero gained a well-earned reward
in the form of a handsome marriage, or in being honoured
by the gods. The hero had become a gladiator who was occasionally granted his
freedom after he had been thoroughly flailed and was covered in wounds. The deus ex machina has
taken the place of metaphysical solace. I do not say that the tragic view of
the world was destroyed everywhere and utterly by the advancing spirit of the
un-Dionysiac; we only know that it had to flee from
art and into the underworld, as it were, where it degenerated into a secret
cult. But almost everywhere in Hellenic life havoc was wreaked by the
withering breath of that spirit which manifests itself in the kind of 'Greek
cheerfulness' discussed above, as senile, unproductive pleasure in existence;
this cheerfulness is the very opposite of the glorious 'naïveté' of the older
Greeks as this should be understood, according to the characterization above,
namely as the flower of Apolline culture growing
from the depths of a gloomy abyss, as a victory which the Hellenic will gains
over suffering and the wisdom of suffering through the image of beauty shown
in its mirror. The noblest form of that other, Alexandrian type of 'Greek
cheerfulness' is the cheerfulness of theoretical man which
exhibits the same characteristics as I have just derived from the spirit of
the un-Dionysiac: it fights against Dionysiac wisdom and art; it strives to dissolve myth; it
puts in the place of metaphysical solace a form of earthly harmony, indeed
its very own deus ex machina, namely the god of machines and smelting
furnaces, i.e. the energies of the spirits of nature, understood and applied
in the service of higher egotism; it believes in correcting the world through
knowledge, in life led by science; and it is truly capable of confining the
individual within the smallest circle of solvable tasks, in the midst of
which he cheerfully says to life: 'I will you: you are worth understanding.'

Notes

59. Problemata 19.48.922b18ff.

60. In his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (3
vols., 1809–11), Fifth Lecture, Schlegel
emphasizes the 'republican spirit' of ancient tragedy and its political
content.

61. The daughters of Oceanus form the chorus of Aeschylus' Prometheus
Bound. The title page of the original edition of Birth of Tragedy had
a design depicting the moment when Prometheus is about to be freed from his
bondage. (This design is reproduced on the front cover of Nietzsche
on Tragedy by M. Silk and J. P. Stern (Cambridge University Press,
1981).)

62. What Nietzsche claims here as a property of ancient tragedy
is described by Schiller as a specific feature of the use of the chorus in
modern (as opposed to ancient) times.